Custom Cabinets – What Makes A Good Custom Cabinet?

byCustom Cabinet BuilderonAugust 16, 2016

Custom Cabinets – What Makes A Good Custom Cabinet Video Transcript:

I’m coming to you from my cabinet maker shop here in South Austin, we’re at Honea wood works, and I want to tell you some things today that will help you in discerning what’s an average cabinet and was an extraordinary cabinet.

First let’s talk about case work. If you look at this display back here, the case work is really the meat or the structure of the cabinet. We really want to look for a veneer core plywood for that case.

Have you ever seen a cabinet that blew up because of a water leak. That was not a veneer core cabinet.

That was probably a Melamine or particle board cabinet and I’m not a fan of those.

We want to try to avoid those.

The next thing that I think separates a really well built cabinet is the drawer construction.

I use mostly plywood drawers with a lock shoulder.

But another great option is to go to a hardwood drawer with dovetails like this one right here.

You want to try to avoid butt joints and Melamine drawers.

The next thing on my list is hardware.

This basic hardware right here, this is an Accuride side mount ball bearing slide and they still work great.

This is a really good baseline for me.

A nice upgrade however, and one that I use on most of my houses, is this right here.

This is an under-mount drawer slide to get a little bit wider box. It also has a soft close feature, so those drawers don’t slam shut.

The next thing I want to talk about is install.

This is one that really separates my houses from some of my competitors.

This cabinet right here, well-crafted, but installed pretty traditionally.

If you look at where the cabinet meets the floor we’ve got a shoe mold.

To hide that joint and where the cabinet hits a wall, we’ve got another molding there. This is often called a scribe mold or screen mold. So this cabinet, when it’s put in place, needs something to hide those joints.

What if you didn’t want those moldings. The way to do that is to build the cabinet box a little bit bigger, especially where it hits the wall, and then use a compass and scribe that cabinet to the wall so that that cabinet actually fits like a hand in glove just perfectly in place. When you do that, you don’t need any additional moldings.

The same goes with the end panel on this cabinet. It’s been made a little bit long, and then the cabinet installer when he’s on-site, will scribe it to the floor so that we’ve got a perfect fit.

Your architect is really gonna like that option.

And the last thing, I want to talk about is shop finishes.

I’m a big fan of getting these cabinets finished at the cabinet maker shop and delivered to my site totally done.

In the years past, when I’ve used the painter to paint cabinets, we’ve got a good finish, but we didn’t get a fantastic finish, and it just doesn’t hold up long-term.

So check out a cabinet shop that can pre-finish those cabinets for you, protect them really well once they get installed, and then you’re gonna have really a top of the line, extraordinary cabinet.